Adventures in Folk Horror

Nimue Brown

May 30

(Nimue)

I've never actually written a folk horror novel. The Hopeless, Maine books have elements of it in the mix, but aren't quite it. This year I decided to give it a go and I mean to start writing this summer. I have the ideas in place, and will have a structure before I start (13 chapters) but I don't have a title yet.

I have an academic friend (no name dropping at this point) who is a folklorist and who has a lot of issues with the folk horror genre. How 'the folk' are themselves the source of the horror is high on the list, along with how folklore gets represented. This spring I read and pondered a number of his essays on the subject – which he helpfully sent me. My ambition is to write a folk horror novel that would work for him.

It's an interesting challenge, aiming to stay inside the framework but also to subvert it. On top of that there's the issue that I am prone to comedy horror and there's a distinct risk I'll end up with something more Hot Fuzz than Wickerman. But there we go.

One of the problems I have with folk horror is that it tends to be singular. The murder village will usually have one story about one thing - one god in the woods, one weird entity, one place we must never go, one ghost story… and folklore isn't like that at all. Landscapes are often full of stories and many of those stories are not connected in any other way. Folk horror so often depends on knowledge of the terrible secret, and a whole lot of people being willing to go along with it. People don't reliably work like that either.

Plurality is definitely going to be a theme. Like a lot of places in the UK, my landscape includes pre-historic, Iron Age, and features from thereafter. The folklore is diverse and intertwines with the history in some interesting ways. We have some pretty weird local customs – most infamously the cheese rolling, an annual sacrifice of ankle joints to the bemused gods of a very steep field.

I'll be drawing on my landscape for this book, but also inventing the village. Mostly because I'm not going to come right out and name one of the local villages as a murder village. Which obviously none of them are. And if they were, it clearly wouldn't be wise to mention it!